


101 Allegorian Knights

by tjs_whatnot



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Friendship, Gen, Minor Character Death, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-20
Updated: 2009-09-07
Packaged: 2018-10-27 07:54:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10804971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tjs_whatnot/pseuds/tjs_whatnot
Summary: “Tell me a story,” the raspy, seldom-used voice of the man ordered. “Make it a happy story, full of life and love. We’ve had enough tragedy, enough suffering.”To save them both from despair and misery, Luna Lovegood tells the story of how she meet and lost her best friend. Her only promise...It will have a happy ending.





	1. Chapter 1--Once Upon a Time

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Annie, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Quidditch Pitch](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Quidditch_Pitch), which went offline in 2015 when the hosting expired.
> 
>  
> 
> **Author's notes:**
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>  
> 
> This was written for Kerosinkanister who was the Ron-a-Thon winner. He asked for a story that wasn't slash and wasn't Hermione. This is what he got!

The cobblestone walls perspired in moldy dew and the air, frigid and bracing, smelled of decay and hopelessness. The chill that set in her bones and the shaking of the frail old man leaning against her in the dark dungeon were her only indications that night had come again.  

 

The young woman placed her arm gently around the man’s bony shoulder and guided him to lie down as she had every night of their captivity. Her skirt, bunched up on her knees, acted as his pillow.  Her robe was his blanket. At first, he had protested against her giving up her comforts for him, but she had won that argument long ago, and they never spoke of it again. His clothes were rags, covering his nakedness, but doing nothing to hide the shiver that always lived within him. 

 

For her, the imprisonment into darkness and despair had been brief—if words such as that were adequate—for brevity in captivity still felt like eternity. However, in comparison to her fellow prisoner who she knew had been missing for at least six months prior to her own disappearance, she was new to incarceration.  She understood that her waning optimism was the only thing keeping him alive. She forced herself to keep what bit she had left, just as she forced herself to stop trembling as she removed her robe and settled it around her companion’s malnourished frame.

 

“Tell me a story,” the raspy, seldom-used voice of the man ordered. “Make it a happy story, full of life and love. We’ve had enough tragedy, enough suffering.”

 

Living in constant darkness where days interloped with the nights and where meals were given when remembered and never in any discernable pattern, the girl only had one way to mark the passing of time. It was how many times she was asked to give a story.

 

She marked the wall beside her. It was a futile gesture, as they rarely ever got light inside their chamber anymore. Back when she had first been thrown in, her wand taken away, she had been strong enough to perform a bit of wandless magic and create a little bit of light. But then her captors had sprinkled Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder. Weeks later her strength was so weak, her hope and magic so stunted she could no longer conjure so much as a flicker, and the powder became unnecessary.

 

A happy story? She thought hard about what story to tell; she liked to tell stories of fantastical creatures that had powers that were immeasurable and unstoppable, but she had already told about Nargles, Crumple-Horned Snorkacks and Blibbering Humdingers and she was running out of ideas.  Perhaps she should tell a story about a different magical creature, just as real and just as powerful.

 

With her fingers, she unconsciously began swiping the old man’s hair off his face and stroking his forehead to soothe him to slumber. She seemed to remember this gesture from a long-forgotten glimpse of a life with a mother. A childhood sickness and a soothing hand; it seemed appropriate here.

 

Taking a deep breath and closing her eyes to summon an image of light, laughter and life, she began her story.

 

 

*******

 

 

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Luna Lovegood. She was a happy, delightful little girl who had a mother and father who loved her immensely. They taught her that there was nothing she couldn’t do, couldn’t be. They each had their passions and they encouraged her to find her own—each secretly hoping she would choose theirs.

 

Her mother was a brilliant witch who her father called a Magical Inventor but Mrs. Lovegood likened herself more to someone who saw how the world should be and was working hard to make it so. Mr. Lovegood was doing that himself, but in a different way. He was the editor of an alternative magazine that told the truths that no one wanted to believe or admit were true. They allowed their young daughter to believe what she wanted.

 

They lived on the side of a mountain overlooking the tiny, little village of Ottery St. Catchpole. On their property was a stream where there lived Freshwater Plimpies and Grindylows, and a forest where there were many magical creatures. Some Luna had already found and befriended and others that she was constantly on the lookout for. 

 

One day, the summer she turned seven, she was walking through the forest, dropping Nergly berries, hoping they would attract the elusive Whangdoodle. She had heard tales of the species and their healing song. She’d also heard that they didn’t like to be seen and if you got a glimpse of them, cracking an egg over their head trapped them momentarily so that one could either investigate them further or attempt to gain their trust. 

 

She had learned to move about the forest soundlessly, her bare feet sliding over the earth without snapping twigs, kicking rocks or squishing muddy soil. Her long skirt’s swish mimicked the rustle of the leaves’ windy dance.

 

Deep under the canvas of the trees, where the light of the sun sprinkled in between branches heavy with foliage, she heard a noise. An unusual noise. It sounded like weeping, like a muffled sob. She didn’t see anything at first, but as she slowly approached she saw something in the distance hid partially by a large sycamore. It filled her with barely contained excitement. The matted fur of the Whangdoodle, ginger with a sparkling of gold.

 

Creeping slowly and cautiously, she approached as she reached in her pocket for the egg she had been carrying with her for days. She had to stop herself from rushing, from being overzealous about catching her prey. She just wanted to hear the Whangdoodle’s song, not to harm it, never to harm.

 

Egg in her hand and hand over her head, she approached. Before she scared it off, before she saw the blue eyes that turned at her last footfall snapped a twig, she brought the egg down on the head of what she realized a fraction of a moment before, was not, in fact a Whangdoodle, but a boy.

 

“Hey!” the boy shouted, rising to his feet and touching his slimy head. “What are you doing?”

 

“So sorry, so very sorry!” Luna exclaimed, truly embarrassed and a little sickened by the smell coming off the boy’s red hair. 

 

“Why did you do that?” the boy asked, curiosity fighting with anger.

 

“I…I thought you were a Whangdoodle. I was trying to stop you from escaping.”

 

“Well, I’m not! And I…what…is that smell?” he smelled his own hand, smeared with rotten egg, “Oh gross!” He glared at her.

 

Luna blushed. “Come with me. I’ll take you to the stream and wash you.”

 

The boy eyed her suspiciously. “You aren’t going to splat me with anything else are you?”

 

“No. I don’t have anything else.”

 

Relenting, the boy slung the rucksack over his shoulder and started to follow her through the woods, clomping and stomping behind her. Luna sighed; there went any chances of finding a Whangdoodle on that day. 

 

“My name is Luna Lovegood by the way. What’s yours?”

 

“Ron Weasley.”

 

“Nice to meet you.”

 

“Yeah, I’m not sure if I can agree.”

 

Luna looked more puzzled then hurt. 

 

They didn’t talk again until they arrived at the stream. Then they both tried to talk at the same time.

 

“What is a Whangdoodle?” Ron asked.

 

“Why were you crying?” Luna asked.

 

“It’s a magical creature that is said to live in this region. They’re very hard to find and I was so excited when I thought you were one.” She took one of the scarves she had wrapped around her waist and dipped it into the water.  

 

 “Why were you crying?” she asked again, handing the heavy, dripping cloth to the boy.

 

 “I wasn’t crying!” Ron replied, puffing out his small chest and looking indignant.

 

Luna studied him.

 

“I wasn’t! Stop looking at me like that. I wasn’t crying, okay!”

 

She shrugged. “If you say so. What are you doing out here in the woods all by yourself?”

 

“Running away, I’m going to be a pirate!” he said in a rush and then looked amazed at himself for the confession.

 

“From what?”

 

He bent over and put the soaked cloth over his head and squeezed, issuing a tiny shriek at the cold water drenched his hair and neck.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“What do you mean what do I mean? Who or what are you running away from?” Luna asked, worried that some of the putrid egg might have seeped into his brain.

 

“My family.”

 

“Why?”

 

They studied each other again and Luna felt as if she had discovered something even more magical, even more elusive than a Whangdoodle. A friend.

 

Ron must have felt the same for he allowed her to lead them to a meadow, where they sat and chewed on Nergly berries until their lips turned blue and he told her things that he wouldn’t imagine telling anyone. 

 

He told her how sometimes in his family, he felt as if he were invisible, that he didn’t matter, that he was pretty sure his mother had wished he was a girl. He had never owned anything that was new and two of his brothers used him as their own personal toy, poking and prodding him for their own amusement.

 

“Last week they locked me in the shed for the whole day and no one even noticed I was gone,” Ron pouted, and even though he said he hadn’t been crying earlier, it sounded like we was about to start.

 

“You should come home with me,” Luna said. “My mummy and dad will take care of you. I wouldn’t lock you in a shed.”

 

Ron didn’t seem to think too highly of the offer, but he conceded to going to her house for some nourishment before heading off for a life of adventure.

 

 

When they got to Luna’s house, she got him a glass of water and then went and looked for her mother.

 

“You’ll never guess what I found in the forest. Come, come and look.” She rushed the words out when she found her mother in her study. “Can I keep it? Please, please!”

 

“Luna baby, calm down. What have I told you about bringing creatures into the house?” Mrs. Lovegood marked her place in the massive book with her finger, and looked at her daughter with a smile.

 

“Oh, but it’s not a creature. Not really.”

 

Replacing the finger with a bookmark, Mrs. Lovegood followed her daughter downstairs. They both stopped right before entering and peeked their heads in. If Luna’s mother was surprised to find a little boy in her kitchen, she hid it well.

 

“Isn’t he cute? He needs a home. I promise I’ll do all the work,” Luna begged.

 

The woman had heard this proclamation many times, but never had it brought that particular smile to her lips, the one that made her eyes moist. She hugged her daughter to her. “Honey, while I do agree that he is adorable, I’m sure he already has a home.”

 

“No, no. He’s running away. They have too many of them. We don’t have any.”

 

Luna’s mother hugged her tightly again. “Let’s go see if he’s house-broken.”

 

Luna introduced her mother to her new _friend_. She loved the way that sounded. “Mom, this is my friend, Ron Weasley. Ron, this is Pandora, my mum.”

 

“Hello Ron. Are you hungry?”

 

Ron watched her, mesmerized. After a minute, he realized he hadn’t answered and shook his head and mumbled, “No thank you.”

 

“You sure?” Pandora asked. “If you’re running away, you might not know where and when you will get your next meal. Let me make you some toast.”

 

Still he seemed speechless, but he nodded his head so she went about making him a meal.

 

“That’s your mum? Your _real_ mum?” he whispered.

 

“What do you mean?” Luna asked, worried. She, like many children do, once believed that she did not belong to these parents. But, unlike most children, this idea filled her with terror.

 

“She’s so young and so…pretty,” he said it as if the concept sounded foreign to him. “Mums are supposed to be old and…”

 

Luna breathed in relief. “Your mum’s not young and pretty?”

 

“She might have been pretty once, but that was before she had seven kids.”

 

“Seven kids! You have six brothers and sisters?” Luna was awed. There was another feeling in there too, but having never experienced the pull of jealousy, she didn’t know what the feeling was.

 

“Five brothers, one sister.”

 

“Wow.” Now Luna was speechless.

 

“You must belong to the Weasleys that live down the lane,” Pandora said from across the room.

 

“Yes.”

 

“So, are you excited to be going to Hogwarts?”

 

“I can’t wait! Three more years seems such a long time.”

 

“I have to wait four years,” Luna said. She hadn’t really thought about Hogwarts too much. It seemed unreal that there would come a time where she would go somewhere else to learn.

 

“Who is teaching you now?” Pandora asked.

 

“Oh, we go to the Ministry school in the village. Well except for Bill and Charlie, my oldest brothers. Oh and Percy, he’s going to Hogwarts next year too,” he answered, then he asked Luna, “Where do you go to school?”

 

“Oh, I’m homeschooled.” 

 

“Blimey! I couldn’t even imagine that.” He looked around.

 

Luna shrugged. “I like it.” And she did. There wasn’t anything she didn’t think her mother and father knew. Sure it was lonely, but she reasoned, that was what Hogwarts was for.

 

“Yeah, but who teaches you how to read?” 

 

“Teaches me?” Luna asked. Then she looked at her mother, “Mum, haven’t I always known how to read?”

 

The women laughed musically. “Well, you didn’t come out of the womb reading _Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump_ , but you picked it up rather fast. I don’t know that you had to be taught, just instructed on the rules of grammar, perhaps.”

 

She beamed at Ron who looked at her as if she were an oddity. 

 

“What about maths?”

 

“Mum and dad take turns. Dad likes to work with real numbers and balancing while mum does the abstracts and applications.”

 

His strange look only intensified. “How old are you?”

 

“I’ll be seven at the end of summer.”

 

She felt that he was scared or awed by her; she desperately wanted to change the subject. “What does your father do?”

 

“He works at the Ministry. He is under…secre…tary to the head of the Misuse of Muggle…things…department.” He seemed to be ashamed of his own stumbling but then Luna’s mother placed toast and jams before him, smiling warmly. He relaxed. “It’s a new position.”

 

“It sounds fascinating,” Pandora said.

 

She excused herself and the two children began talking while Ron, who _really_ wasn’t hungry, shoveled toast into his mouth.

 

Luna didn’t know why her mother had left the room, but ten minutes later when there was an urgent knock on the back door, she had her suspicions.

 

A woman entered the kitchen in a whirlwind of noise and color. 

 

“Ronald Weasley! You scared me half to death!” she screeched, scooping her missing child to her ample breasts and upsetting the furniture. 

 

The little girl watched this volatile tornado of a woman just as awestruck as Ron had been with her own mother. Luna thought he was mistaken about her beauty. True, she wasn’t blond-haired, blue-eyed, fairy princess beautiful like she thought her own mother was, but Mrs. Weasley had a presence of assured womanliness that Luna only dreamed of ever achieving. Her own mother seemed to shrink to girl-size proportions in Mrs. Weasley’s presence as well.

 

“Mum, get off,” Ron said, trying to wiggle out of his mother’s clutches.

 

“Thank you so much for taking care of my boy,” Mrs. Weasley said, finally acknowledging the others in the room.

 

“It was nothing,” Pandora said.

 

“We’ve burdened you, we’ll be going,” the women said.

 

“Not at all,” Pandora said, even more politely. “In fact, I hope you will permit me to ask. May I have a word with you, in the other room?”

 

Luna looked from one woman to the other. She had never heard her mother use this tone. She was never short with people, but she never gave people much of her time, preferring to spend it with her family and her books. As the women walked out of the room, Luna looked at Ron, he looked back at her and then they both ran for the door to eavesdrop.

 

“I think your son and my daughter could be very good for each other. My Luna needs to have peer relations and your Ron obviously needs some atten—”

 

They didn’t know why she stopped but the “Humpf” made Ron wince. 

 

“She shouldn’t have said that.”

 

“What did she say?” Luna asked, confused.

 

“Wait for it.”

 

“You dare to tell me how to raise my son? To tell me that I’m not giving him enough of my attention?”

 

“Of course no—”

 

“I don’t need the likes of you telling me how to be a good mother. Ron gets all the _peer relations_ he needs at home and at school. Just because the Ministry school isn’t good enough for _your_ Luna—”

 

“There is no reason for that tone Mrs. Weasley. We are neighbors and should be civil. I don’t criticize the way you choose to educate your children.”

 

“No, just the way I raise them.”

 

“I’m sorry if you felt that was what I was doing. Please forgive me if I thought that the boy running away was a sign that he was missing something. I shouldn’t have assumed.”

 

There was no more talking but Ron looked even more worried. “It was nice meeting you Luna.”

 

Luna swallowed, not knowing why he was saying goodbye, only knowing that was what he was doing.

 

“Ronald Weasley!” They heard the screech and both of their hair stood up on their arms. “We are leaving!”

 

She stormed out of the room, only barely missing stumbling over the children because Ron had the forethought to grab Luna’s hand and pull her out of harm’s way.

 

His mother clutched his hand and yanked him out of the house just as he had let go of Luna. 

 

“Thank you Mrs. Lovegood for the toast,” he barely got out.

 

Luna didn’t know why any of that had happened, didn’t know why she felt the way she did, but as the tears welled up in her eyes, she knew for the first time in her little life, she wanted to be left alone.

 

She ran up to her room.

 

An hour later, Luna’s mother’s peeked into her room and watched her staring out of her window with swollen eyes and embracing a pillow.  “May I come up?”

 

Luna didn’t say anything, but there was the smallest of head nods that permitted her mother to finish climbing the stairs, tea tray in hand.

 

She placed the tray down on a stool and sat on the bed next to her daughter. She slid the girl’s head on top of her knees and began stroking her hair. 

 

“I really liked him,” Luna whispered, her throat dry and scratchy.

 

“I’m sorry,” her mother said quietly, “I guess you’re not the only one who needs a bit of peer relations to know how to talk to people properly.”

 

They remained in that position, mother gently petting distraught daughter, both silent. 

 

The little girl broke the silence. “It’s okay mum. Tomorrow I will go back to the forest and I will find the Whangdoodle and then I won’t need any people friends.” 

 

Luna felt one teardrop fall from her mother onto her own cheek.  Then, she felt her mother lie down and wrap her arms around her tightly.

 

 

And that is the story of how Luna Lovegood almost made a friend.

 

 

***

 

“I thought you said you’d tell a happy story,” the man wheezed.

 

“Shhh, shhh,” the young woman soothed; she thought he had dozed off long ago. “Every story needs a little melancholy to make the happy worth anything. The story is not over and I promise; it will have a happy ending. Do you believe me?”

 

“Of course,” he croaked. His voice was hoarse from thirst and little use.

 

“Then hush now and go to sleep,” she whispered. “Everything will be okay.”

 

And like every other night, she lulled him to sleep before dozing off herself. 

 

***

 

Minutes dragged by. The girl tried not to count them and sort them, she couldn’t help but try and make them mean something. When she couldn’t see the end to the suffering, couldn’t see the point of going on, her thoughts turned morbid and ideas crept in uninvited and unwanted.

 

To her, times like these, when it seemed as if her companion would never ask her to escape the dungeon, if only in her mind, in her imagination, felt like she would never be free of her own sinking spirits. Yet, each night, just when she was about to burst with her own melancholy, he would raise her out of the depths with his own need. She would sigh, close her eyes and try to bring them both inside her mind.

 

“Tell me a story,” he finally asked. “Make it a happy one. We’ve had enough tragedy, enough suffering.”

 

Scratching another notch in the stone floor she began again…

 

*******

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Luna Lovegood. She was a happy child and although she had gotten very close to having a friend, she tried not to dwell on him, or on the fact that he had appeared at the start of one day, and left by the end of it. She tried to forget that she had been happier in those few hours than she could remember ever being before. 

 

The day after she had met and lost Ron Weasley, she did what she said she would and went back out to the woods. She tried to forget about him, tried to forget that he had listened when she talked and had been amazed by her brilliance. Half-heartedly she would scatter Nergly berries and randomly search. But, if she really admitted it to herself, it wasn’t the Whangdoodle’s ginger fur she was really looking for. 

 

The day after that, and the day after that one as well, she went out again and tried to believe she was happy. On the fourth day, her happiness became real. 

 

Sitting at the stream, washing Nergly berry juice off her fingers, she heard a whistling from behind her and spun around. There stood Ron Weasley, her friend Ron Weasley, smiling mischievously and whistling poorly.

 

“I was beginning to think you were a figment of my imagination,” he said, mirroring her thoughts exactly. 

 

The hair on the back of her neck stood up. “What are you doing here?”

 

“What do you mean? I thought we were going to be friends!”

 

“But your mum said no. She thinks my mum and me are too strange.”

 

Ron shrugged and sat down next to her. “My dad collects spark plugs; she can’t really talk, can she?”

 

“What are spark plugs?”

 

“I don’t really know, but mum makes him hide them whenever we have company over.”

 

“Interesting,” Luna said, curious. “Aren’t you going to be in trouble for being here?”

 

“Only if they notice I’m gone. So, no.”

 

Luna watched him to see if there was hidden bitterness or sadness, but he seemed to have accepted that he had been forgotten by his family. She felt his sadness for him; it was the least she could do.

 

“So, what do you want to do?”

 

“I don’t know. What were you doing before I came?”

 

“I’m still looking for the Whangdoodle,” Luna said. She would never admit that what she was really doing was hoping she would see him again.

 

“Tell me about them.”

 

Luna was in heaven. She spent the rest of the afternoon teaching her new friend about the magical creatures all around them. He only looked at her as if she were mad a handful of times, but mostly he seemed interested.

 

“Can I come with you tomorrow to find them?” Ron asked at the end of the day.

 

“Of course.”

 

For the rest of the summer, they spent as little as a few hours and as much as half a day everyday looking for the Whangdoodle and Glumbumble, and one time they even found a Porlock.

 

 

One day they got particularly dirty slithering through underbrush and splashing around in the river’s muddy banks.

 

“My mum is going to kill me,” Ron said, looking down at his ruined clothes.

 

“Do you want to come to my house and have my mum clean you up? She has a powerful spell for these messes, believe me.”

 

“No, I can’t.”

 

“Why?”

 

He looked nervous. “She can’t know we’re friends, that we still play together.”

 

“Why?” Luna asked again.

 

“Because if she knows, she’ll tell my mum and then she won’t let me out of her sight. We have to be secret friends.”

 

Luna was torn. On one hand, if she’d never had a friend, she’d really never had a secret friend, she was intrigued. However, she’d never kept a secret from her mother. She nodded, “I’ll try.”

 

 Then she looked down at their clothes again. “Take your clothes off.”

 

“What?”

 

“It won’t be much of a secret if you come home looking like that. Take your clothes off and I’ll clean them in the stream while you wash yourself.”

 

“You’d you do that for me?”

 

“Of course, after all it was my fault that you’re so dirty. I was the one who suggested we go through that log to find that Pipsky.”

 

Ron took off his shirt. “You’re right; it is all your fault.” He threw the shirt at her and then continued to take off his clothes until he was standing in his pants.

 

Removing all her clothes except her knickers, she walked into the middle of the stream while Ron gingerly followed.

 

“The water is so cold.”

 

 “You get used to it,” she said, splashing their clothes and herself.

 

“Really?” Ron asked, easing his way further in. He reached down, cupped the frigid water and splashed her with it.

 

She screeched, “Hey, that’s cold.”

 

“I told you.”

 

“That wasn’t very nice.”

 

“Nice?” Ron asked, sounding as if he were unfamiliar with the word.

 

Luna dropped the subject and splashed him back. 

 

By the time Luna had cleaned their clothes, they were both completely drenched and laughing until they were out of breath.

 

“I told you that you would get used to it,” Luna said.

 

They climbed out of the water. Luna placed their clothes on a low hanging branch that hung over the stream and then they went to lay down in the meadow to wait for them to dry.

 

They lay on their backs and Ron took a long strand of grass and began chewing on it. The sun was far to the west, but there was still plenty of warmth and light. 

 

“What does that look like to you,” Luna asked, pointing up to one of the many puffy clouds above them.

 

Ron looked. “A cloud?”

 

“Well yeah. But the shape, what does the shape remind you of?”

 

Ron tilted his head and squinted. “That one?” he pointed.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Um…a cat?”

 

Now Luna studied it, tilting her head like he had. “Oh, yeah, I can see that. I thought it looked more like a Whangdoodle, with that horn there.”

 

 “How do you know about Whangdoodle and those other things?”

 

“Different places. Most I see in a dream and then go and find them in the books. Some are in there, like the Dugbog and the Jarvey, but others haven’t been discovered and documented yet. Those are the ones that I want to find.”

 

“But how do you know they’re real?”

 

“The same reason I know you and I are real. I believe.”

 

Ron gave her one of those odd looks that he sometimes gave her. She had yet to discover what this one meant. Then he smiled one of his whole-face smiles that Luna liked to see on him and that he only used on rare occasions. It seemed he was always goofing around, but he seemed very rarely truly happy.

 

“I believe too.”

 

They sat and watched the clouds and talked about how the summer was almost over and they hoped all summers would be like this one. 

 

Luna went home that afternoon and for the first time she wondered what it would be like to be at school with other kids. If they were all like Ron Weasley, then it couldn’t be all bad, could it?

 

“What’s up, Buttercup?” Pandora asked her daughter as they sat down for the afternoon tea.

 

Luna, who had never kept anything from her mother, was having a hard time with the new word: secret. “Nothing.”

 

“You sure?”

 

She didn’t answer right away, but eventually she asked, “Did your mum and dad teach you or did you go to a school?”

 

Pandora sighed and looker forlorn. “I was taught at home. So was your father. However, for us, it was a little different, we both had siblings who were learning right beside us. While it wasn’t like having friends, it wasn’t as solitary. That is why your father and I try to be all those things for you. We know we’re not the same as real friends, but for now, I hope we are here for you when you need us most of the time.”

 

Luna came to her mother and wrapped her arms around her, sitting on her lap and burying her face in her neck.

 

“If you wanted to go to school, we would send you. People like us though; we need to learn differently than others. Different things challenge us.”

 

Luna nodded and tried to smile, but that night all she heard in her head was _different, different, different._

And that is the story of how Luna Lovegood discovered that she was “different.”

 

***

 

“Child,” the old man whispered. “Why must your stories be so sad?”

 

“Trust me,” the girl said, wiping his brow gently. “There will be a happy ending.”

 

“I do trust you, but I’m afraid I’m running out of time for the happy ending.”

 

“Shhhh, don’t talk like that. You have to hear how this story turns out don’t you? If you give up before the end, you’ll never get your happily ever after.”

 

“You can’t possibly believe in happily ever after, can you?”

 

“I have believed in things far more unlikely then a happy ending.”

 

The man smiled before slipping into his light slumber.

 

***

 

The man was sleeping more and more and the girl was trying harder and harder to continue to see any light. The stories she told seemed to be keeping them both alive now and she sometimes had to refrain from waking him to keep telling them. In those times, she would close her eyes and think of what parts she would tell next. 

 

She wanted to smell the woodsy aroma of the forest, the steely scent of the stream, the sweaty and grass-stained perfume of Ron. She tried really hard to conjure that certain sparkly of her mother’s smile, the particular twitch of her father’s nose when he laughed and the exact blue of her childhood friend’s eyes. 

 

It seemed  that it was right when the memory shimmered before her that _they_ would come and destroy it all. 

 

 _They_ were the blond boy that she recognized from school and a silver-handed man. The boy was a tolerable jailor. His heart didn’t seem to be in it and she had a sense that he was imprisoned as well, although she couldn’t feel too sorry for him as he lived in the prison that had light and food, shelter and warmth. 

 

The silver-handed man was the one who sent shivers down her spine. The way his watery eyes watched her from the beginning and the way that silver hand glided over her skin as he became more courageous, more boldly sinister. When he would finish molesting her, and she would steal a glance at him through eyes she’d have to force to slit open, she would see a struggle in him and the way he looked revolted at what his shiny hand had done, as if it weren’t a part of him.

 

Those were the nights that she, too, wished for nothing more than a cheerful story where nothing bad happened and no one hurt anyone else. But those were the nights when she couldn’t even conjure up a clever anecdote without adding bitter imaginings and pessimistic asides.

 

***

 

“Tell me a story,” he finally asked. “Make it a happy one. We’ve had enough tragedy, enough suffering.”

 

Scratching another notch in the stone floor, she began again…

 

***

 

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Luna Lovegood. She was happy with her family, with her life and with her friend Ron Weasley. She was even learning to be happy being different. That year, it was a little harder for her to stay put in her seat and listen to her mother’s lectures and a bit more strenuous to perform her exercises alongside her father, as she imagined what Ron and his brothers and sister were doing with the other children in the schoolhouse.

 

Occasionally, she would be down by the road when they got out of school and she would watch Ron, walk by, his older twin brothers leading the way, he and his little sister following behind. If he saw Luna watching, he would give her a quick wave and a smile over his shoulder as they walked by. His sister would sometimes wave but would never say anything. Her mother must have warned her to stay clear of that crazy Lovegood family.

 

The girl understood why she and Ron could really only see each other in the summer months. The school year was full of school, family obligations and cold weather. It was the summers that were long days full of too many children underfoot so that Ron would be sent out of the house to find some way to amuse himself. 

 

Luna counted the days for summer, and when it finally arrived, she waited on the top of the hill that overlooked the Weasley’s for her first glimpse of her summer friend.

 

“Whatcha doin’?” Ron asked, sneaking up behind her and plopping down to lie beside her.

 

Luna screeched. “You scared me! How did you get here?”

 

He smiled wickedly and rolled onto his back. “It’s magic.”

 

She slugged him lightly and then rolled onto her back too. They talked as they watched the clouds.

 

“So, how was your year?” she asked.

 

He began picking pieces of grass, one at a time, investigating and then disposing them as he answered. “Ugh! It was torture. I can’t wait until next year when Fred and George finally go to Hogwarts.”

 

“Yes, but then soon you will be there.”

 

“Ah, that won’t matter. Hogwarts is a big school and I can stay away from them, blend in and they won’t even notice me.”

 

“They can’t be that bad.”

 

He had found a blade of grass to his liking and, taking it gently between his thumbs, he raised it to his lips and blew. A squeaky sound issued, he shrugged. “I guess they’re not terrible always. They are right funny usually  and, occasionally, will let me in on jokes they play on the rest of the family, but most of the time, it seems I’m the one getting the jokes played on. Then it’s not so fun.”

 

He whistled a little melody with his piece of grass. She sighed and watched him, and then turned to the clouds, and then to him again. It had been a long year.

 

“Have you found any other magical creatures yet?” Ron asked. “Please tell me you didn’t find a Whangdoodle without me.”

 

“No, but I did find more evidence.”

 

“Yeah? What?”

 

“Droppings.”

 

“Droppings?” he asked, disappointed. “Maybe I wouldn’t mind so much if you found it without me.”

 

She laughed and punched his arm lightly. “It’s going to be amazing when we finally find them. We’ll go down in history.”

 

Ron’s eyes sparkled. “That would be nice right? The brilliant Luna Lovegood and the spectacularly brave Ron Weasley did what no other could. I wonder if they’d name an ice cream after us at Fortescue’s.”

 

“Maybe write books about us and our amazing discoveries.”

 

Ron sat up, disregarding the blade of grass. “When do we get started, Your Brilliance?”

 

“Well Brave One, how about tomorrow?”

 

Standing up, he bowed. Giggling, she stood up and curtseyed.

 

 

 

If Luna thought the summer before had been magical, then this summer was a whole new sort of magic. 

 

They explored more and more of the forest each day and Ron’s bravery began to rub off on her as they climbed trees and worked on constructing a rope bridge across a particularly rough part of the river. Luna’s creativity began to rub off on Ron as he began to dream of magical creatures while he played along with her make-believe games. She liked to imagine that they were the only two people in the world and that they lived in the forest and had to forage for shelter and food.

 

These games she played helped her deal with this new emotion she was experiencing—an emotion she didn’t have a name for. She discovered later that the feeling was guilt; she had still not told her mother about Ron.  Luna had seen her mother notice the amount of time she spent away from home, and it seemed like her mother had it on the tip of her tongue to ask Luna to spend a bit more time with her as she ran out the door every day. Luna reasoned though, it was only the summers. Her mum got her ten months out of the year, but for two months, she had a best friend to play and have adventures with.

 

One day, they had gone farther into the forest than either of them had gone before and discovered a cave. Luna was excited for she knew that all sorts of magical creatures hid in caves. Ron was excited because caves were dark and scary, and therefore, made excellent forts—plus, he finally got to use the lantern they always carried for this precise reason. 

 

Ron led the way into the cave. Luna followed close behind, until she tripped over a loose rock, clutching Ron’s shirt to keep from falling. After that, she walked right beside him, holding his free hand. Occasionally, they had to climb over rock piles, and maneuver around stalagmites, but each challenge reconfirmed their belief that they were the only two people who had ever been there before.

 

They seemed to be going underground as the air was getting colder and the rocks were getting more damp. They came to a narrow tunnel. Ron picked up a small rock and chucked it as hard as he could through the dark space. Luna wasn’t sure why, but when he heard it land with a thunk seconds later he began to inch his way through it. The passage started out narrow, but became even narrower as they went along, so that a few feet in, they could no longer walk side-by-side, but had to go one after the other.  Then, they had to walk sideways and slide gently, so as not to cut themselves against the almost-touching walls.

 

Luna was just going to suggest turning back when the walls spread out some. But then the rock ceiling lowered drastically and forced them to get on their knees.

 

“Let’s go back,” Luna said, trying not to sound scared.

 

“Hold on. Take the lantern and stay here. I’m just going to go and see how far it goes.”

 

“But you won’t have any light.”

 

“I’ll only go as far as the lantern light. I’ll come back if it gets too dark.”

 

Luna wanted to object but the gleam of adventure in Ron’s eyes and the limited space for putting her foot down made her agree.

 

He got on his hands and knees and gingerly began making his way to the dark unknown. Luna held the lantern as far into the cavern as she could. He was almost past to the point where he would be completely lost to darkness when she heard his scream and then he was gone.

 

Fighting   blinding panic and shaking uncontrollably, she made her way into the place that Ron had gone. She held the lantern far out in front of her and with her other hand began crawling to find him.  

 

“Get off! Get off!” Ron began to scream. Luna heard him right before she reached the hole he had fallen down. She stopped short, inches before she would have joined him. 

 

“Ron! Are you hurt?”

 

He was shrieking something awful and Luna couldn’t make it out but he sounded not only wounded but tortured as well.

 

“I’m going to go for help!”

 

“No! Don’t leave me! Get them off! Off!”

 

Luna waved the lantern into the crack in the earth Ron had fallen into and shrieked herself. Ron was barely visible through the spiders that were crawling all over him. He was on his back and his leg seemed to be in the wrong place.

 

He was screaming horrifically, but then the spiders began crawling on his face and he couldn’t swat them away fast enough. Clamping down his mouth he looked pleadingly and frantic up to Luna. 

 

For a minute, she didn’t know what to do. She really couldn’t get him out of there without some help, but she didn’t want to leave him alone, especially in the dark.

 

“Ron, I’m leaving this here with you,” she leaned the light against the wall. “And I’m going to go and get help.”

 

He shook his head, tears streamed down the sides of his face. 

 

“I’ll be right back!” she screamed as she began crawling back out of the tunnel.

 

She felt like days had passed in the time it took her to get out of the cave in the darkness. Out in the sunlight, she ran as fast as she could through the trees and over the stream, tripping and falling repeatedly in her haste, but not caring. 

 

Finally, right when she didn’t think she could take another breathe, she found her mother out in the yard, gardening.

 

She ran to her and began tugging on her mother before she could get the words out. “It’s Ron! He’s hurt in a cave. He needs you.”

 

Pandora looked at her daughter questioningly for only a moment before she grabbed her hand and spun on the spot, Apparating to the only nearby cave she knew of.

 

They were standing outside the cave. Pandora got on her knees and grasped her daughter’s arms. “You have to tell me exactly where he is.”

 

Luna told her as much as she could. Pandora stood up again and held her hand. “Close your eyes and concentrate very hard on the location. I’m counting on you to take us.”

 

Luna swallowed hard and nodded. She didn’t know if this it was possible to guide her, but she trusted her mother and her magic. Closing her eyes tight, she thought about Ron and that place he was being tortured by spiders.

 

The sobbing and rustling told them instantly that they were in the right place. Wand light exploded throughout the cave as Pandora wordlessly cast the spell. 

 

With another flick of her wand, the spiders were gone and the moment they were, the cave echoed with a bellowing wail that almost shook the caves walls in. 

 

“Oh baby, hold on,” Pandora said, trying to calm Ron.  Pointing her wand at his flailing body, she somehow comforted him and then cast another wordless spell that had him floating gently towards them. Pandora ordered Luna to cling to her after Ron landed softly in the woman’s arms. Neither one of them commented on the wet stain that was growing down Ron’s leg, and when they were again back in their yard moments later, Ron’s pants were dry and clean. Luna had never really grasped just how powerfully magical her mother was. She was awed.

 

“Luna, go down and Floo Mrs. Weasley she—”

 

“Mum, I can’t,” Luna exclaimed while Ron’s eyes finally came into focus and then pleaded with Luna to speak for him. 

 

“Honey, she needs to know Ron is hurt.”

 

“She can’t know. Please.”

 

Pandora stopped her investigation of Ron and turned toward her daughter. “Luna, what is going on here? Why can’t she know?”

 

“My mum doesn’t know we’re friends,” Ron whispered. He tried to sit up but winced in pain.

 

Pandora looked from Ron to her daughter and back again. Then looking down to hide her eyes,

 “Oh.” 

 

Wordlessly, she went about tending to Ron’s wounds. Besides a broken leg, he also had a bruised bump on the back of his head and scratches all over from his own attempts to free himself of the horde of spiders.

 

In no time, Pandora had Ron back on his feet with very little evidence he had been in a horrifying accident earlier that day. While physically he appeared almost as good as new, he had an empty look in his eyes and flinched every time there was a movement. He didn’t talk more then to answer questions about how he was feeling.

 

It was dark out by the time Ron was well enough to go home. Pandora Apparated both of them to right outside his house, and then Disapparated before his mother could see her.

 

That night, she was sure that the spiders would haunt Ron, but for her—it was that look haunting her for nights after. Did Ron blame her for what had happened?  When Luna had said goodbye, he just looked at her with a bone-deep sadness and something else that Luna thought was anger. 

 

She would have asked him, but that was the last time she saw him that summer.

 

And that is the story of how Luna Lovegood lost the only friend she’d ever had.

 

 

***


	2. Chapter 1--Once Upon a Time

The woman knew that she would be admonished for the ending of that story, but there was no rebuke; only the sniffling sounds of hidden sobs.

 

She gently stroked the old man’s temples and soothed him the only way she knew how. She knew it might seem cruel to tell these sad stories, but if the tales kept their minds off the tedious torture they were enduring in their real lives, they were worth it. 

 

Besides, as much as the old man begged for a happy story with a happy ending, she knew what a painful reminder of where they were and what they were going through those stories would be. There would be tears of another kind if in this dark cesspool of the human spirit if she told stories about rainbows and sunshine. 

 

So instead, she dug up painful bits of her past, peppered them with hope and told them until they didn’t hurt anymore. Until she almost wished for those days again.

 

 

***

 

 

“Tell me a story. Make it happy. We’ve had enough tragedy, enough suffering.”

 

Scratching another notch in the stone floor she began again…

 

 

***

 

 

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Luna Lovegood and she was happy most of the time. Weeks before she turned nine, she had lost her only real friend, but she tried to push that out of her mind as the summer ended.

 

She pretended that it was only because of school starting that Ron no longer came around.  That might have been true, but when she would see him walking down the lane after classes were over—now just he and his sister—he wouldn’t even look her way. She knew he purposely wasn’t looking at her, by the way that he seemed to be forcing himself to stare straight in front of him. So, she stopped going to the lane. In fact, she stopped going outside at all. The game of searching for magical creatures had lost its sparkle.

 

Sensing her daughter’s broken heart, Pandora tried to get her involved in her projects, pretending that she needed help. Luna saw through the façade, but played along because she liked spending time with her mother and she learned something new each day. 

 

By the time summer rolled around again, Luna had forgotten a time and place where it wasn’t just her mother and her father and herself. So, when one day, she was sitting at the stream trying to catch Plimpies the whistle shocked her more than it should.

 

“Ron?” she asked, turning away.

 

She didn’t see him, but she heard the whistle, she knew that whistle.

 

“I can hear you. Where are you?”

 

He stepped out from behind a tree a few kilometers away, looking very sheepish. “Hi.”

 

Now Luna looked sheepish too, as if they were meeting again all over again. “Hi.”

 

“It wasn’t your fault.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

They both talked at the same time and then smiled.

 

“I am sorry,” Luna said again.

 

“It wasn’t your fault,” Ron began again. “It was my decision to go into the cave and my decision to crawl through that tunnel without knowing what was in there.”

 

“But you were mad at me, weren’t you?”

 

He looked away, shrugged and then mumbled, “I guess.”

 

Luna didn’t say anything else, just waited.

 

“I guess I was mad because if we weren’t looking for your Whangdoodles we wouldn’t have been in that cave. But mostly, I was mad that you…you…well, I was mad that you saw me act like a baby.”

 

“You didn’t act like a baby!” Luna protested. “You acted like anyone would have if they fell into a large hole and was attacked by a horde of spiders.”

 

She watched him shiver at the mention of spiders. She went on, “I thought you were very brave.”

 

“Really?”

 

She nodded. “Really.”

 

Brightening, he sat beside her. “I don’t want to look for Whangdoodles anymore.”

 

She brightened too, “You don’t have to. I found one. The last of the really great Whangdoodles. It was here right before Easter but I believe that it only comes in the spring on its way to the shore for the summer.”

 

She sounded like she was telling the truth but Ron wondered if she was just saying that to make him feel better. He decided he didn’t care as he asked her about the Whangdoodle: what it looked like, smelled like, ate, and how it communicated. Luna had answers for it all.

 

At the end of the day, Luna only had one question for him. 

 

“Why did you decide to be my friend again?”

 

He looked at her as if she had just asked the stupidest question in the world. “Because you’re my only friend.”

 

 She would have hugged him to her if they’re were the sort of friends who did such things. But they weren’t, so she leaned into him, nudged him with her elbow, looked at him out of the corner of her eye.  Then she laid down on her back to watch the clouds, and tell her stories to her only friend.

 

 

If Luna had thought she had been happy before, if she had thought it was paradise to have a friend, it was nothing to what she felt now. It was like the sadness and the suffering she had felt when she thought she had lost him was the price she had to pay to fully appreciate what it was she had in having Ron Weasley as her very best friend.

 

Not only that, but since the secret was out to Luna’s mother about their friendship, she didn’t have to feel guilty anymore and didn’t have to choose one of her favorite people over the other. Ron seemed to like having Pandora around as much as Luna did. 

 

“Wasn’t it fun fishing with Ron today?” Luna asked her mother one night while she was taking a bath.

 

Luna liked to fill the bath with bubbles and then invite her mother to come and read to her before the bubbles popped and she would send her mother back out again. Luna  knew enough about the stages of adolescents to understand this need for privacy was a perfectly natural thing, but she wasn’t ready to grow up so much that she didn’t need her mother anymore.

 

Pandora put down her beat up copy of _Magical Creatures and Where to Find Them_ that they had been pouring over and editing and adding on to for years now. There was hardly a page that wasn’t marked up or refuted by the Lovegoods.

 

“Yes, it really was. It feels nice to get out of the lab from time to time. It’s a pity that I won’t be able to do it more in the next fortnight.”

 

“Why not, mummy?”

 

There was a gleam in Pandora’s eyes that was particularly for when she was about to make a stunning breakthrough. “You remember when I told you that the only ingredient I am missing from the anti-venom for Spattergroit was the puss from the left fang of a Trantilia?”

 

“Of course I remember.”

 

“Well, while in South America, your father has found and procured the ingredient. I can go ahead with the experiment when he returns, which should be in the next few days. Isn’t that wonderful?”

 

Luna loved when her mother was on the cusp of a breakthrough; she was like a child who had discovered the key to a secret world. Luna especially liked when she herself got carried away by her mother’s giddy excitement.

 

“Maybe next week, you’d like to help me a bit?” 

 

“Really? ’d love to,” Luna answered. She loved when her mother let her in the lab. It didn’t happen often though. Not until Pandora had determined that whatever she was working on was safe. “Can Ron come too?”

 

Something flashed in Pandora’s eyes that Luna couldn’t place. Luna thought she knew all her mother’s looks, but this one was new.

 

“I’d like to spend some mother-daughter time. Just a little bit. You can see Ron later.”

 

“Of course,” Luna said immediately. She might not have recognized the look, but she was familiar with that feeling. That feeling of being pulled between the things she loved—the places she wanted to be.

 

 

Two days later, her father returned with the ingredients and news for the paper. He barely had said hello and delivered his treats—hard to find, but necessary puss for Pandora and corks from exotic lands for Luna’s collection—before he was back to the presses.

 

For the week after, her mother was busy with measuring, experimenting and research while her father was busy writing and printing articles about his newest discoveries. That left Luna free to spend her days with Ron.

 

They had decided that, instead of exploring the woods, they would build a fort, whose frame had been built with Pandora’s help. Luna had collected leafy branches from the forest floor and together, they had tied them to the frame for the walls. Ron, showing his bravery in other ways, filched sheets of tin from an abandoned farmhouse down the road. He then climbed on top of the rickety frame and began attaching the tin to the roof.

 

As Ron swore and banged up his fingers with the hammer, Luna serenely began braiding and weaving flowers together to hang from the door frame. She liked the idea of passing through fragrant beauty to get to the sanctuary within. And though Ron scoffed at this, she knew he secretly liked the idea as well.

 

 

The next day, her mother told her over breakfast that she would like for Luna to help her in the lab later that day. Luna walked in feeling instantly like a grown up. Children were not allowed into the inner workings of scientific discovery. Solemnly she donned the dragon-hide gloves and put on the goggles and other protections.

 

They worked throughout the day. Luna took down notes when Pandora tried different strengths and ingredients to the mixture and handing her fresh powders and beakers from time to time.  Working like this, the young girl felt useful and closer to her mother than ever before.

 

They were just about to finish, just about to put the ingredients away and call it a day, when it happened. Luna had her back to her mother, putting the last of the wrackspurt in the drawer when she heard a sharp intake of breath and felt a hot, strong wind lift her off her feet and throw her meters away form where she was standing.  Then, she heard nothing. 

 

As she lay on the floor with ruble falling around her, she searched frantically for her mother. Pandora was only a few feet away, but Luna had to crawl over piles of what had once been the walls of her mother’s lab to reach her.

 

“Mum,” she screamed. She couldn’t hear her own voice. 

 

Her mother was covered in dust and blood. She took Luna’s face in her shaking hands and mouthed over and over, “Luna, Luna, Luna,” until her eyes glassed over, her hands slid off Luna’s face, and her mouth and her chest no longer moved.

 

 

***

 

The old man’s sobs were matched by the storyteller’s own tears. It was cruel to continue. But she couldn’t stop now. She felt that for both of them, the story had to have its happy ending soon or they wouldn’t live long enough to hear it.

 

He didn’t stop her, and so she continued.

 

***

 

The ringing in Luna’s ears lasted for three days. That was also how long she walked around in a daze not knowing what she was doing or who was in her general vicinity. She vaguely remembered that at her mother’s funeral, she wondered who all the people who attended were, and if they were really her mum’s friends, how come she’d never met them before? Ron and his entire family were there, but she couldn’t talk to any of them, couldn’t even look at Ron’s mum.

 

Thankfully, her father was right there with her in his vacant stare and lack of purpose. Occasionally people stopped by with food and kind words, and she remembered being forced to eat from time to time.  But if she were asked, she never could place what exactly she had eaten and who had given it to her.

 

 

It was a week after her Mother’s funeral that Ron came to see her. 

 

Either not hearing, or not caring enough to respond, Luna didn’t look when the tapping began at her tower bedroom window. Ron practically broke the window before he got her to rise off her bed. She wiped at her eyes and went to open the window.

 

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

 

He had climbed the tree outside her house, how, she didn’t know, but she imagined somehow magic was involved—the first limb was about 20 feet in the air and now he was hanging upside down from a branch, seemingly without fear of death or dismemberment. Luna remembered a time when she didn’t think about death either. 

 

It had been a long week. 

 

Ron reached out his hand, and she helped him into her room. He took a moment to scan the room. Luna knew he didn’t care about the décor; she knew her friend well enough to know he didn’t do well with tears and things like that. Finally though, he turned to her and her exposed grief.

 

“I’m sorry about your mum. I liked her.”

 

“Thanks,” Luna mumbled.

 

“Remember that first day I met her?” he asked after a long, uncomfortable silence.

 

“Right,”--how could Luna forget?--“you thought she was too young and too pretty to be my mum.”

 

“Not to be your mum, to be anyone’s mum.”

 

She had tried so hard to keep it together, really she had, but it was all too much. She hadn’t planned to crumble to a blabbering mess on the floor, but what she _really_ didn’t expect was to have Ron right there with her, arms around her rocking her gently. It was such a nice thing for him to do. Luna couldn’t help but think he had learned it from his mum—who else rocked a bereft child? Of course, this thought brought even more sobs to Luna.

 

Ron’s shoulder was drenched even before Luna finally pulled herself together to talk.

 

“Do you know anything about ghosts?” 

 

“A little bit. I have an uncle who lives in a tree house in Leeds.”

 

Luna smiled briefly. “Really?”

 

“Yeah, he was hung for being a sorcerer—he haunted the town until they built him a house in the very tree he had hung from to appease him.”

 

“Why do you think some people come back and some don’t?”

 

Ron looked uncomfortable being the one to answer questions, especially questions about life and death, especially questions that he knew she wasn’t going to like the answers to.

 

He shrugged. “I guess they come back only if they have unfinished business.”

 

Luna perked up. “I’m unfinished business! Right? She’ll come back and finish what she started while raising me, right?”

 

She looked so hopeful and Ron really didn’t want to squash that, but… “I don’t know if that’s the way it works.”

 

“What do you mean? How do you think it works?”

 

“Well, a lot of mums and dads die. D’you think they’re all around still making their kids lunch and bathing them at night?”

 

He didn’t mean for that to sound as harsh as it did. “What about Harry Potter? You think he’s out there somewhere being raised by ghosts? If any parents left things unfinished, it’s his.”

 

Luna nodded slowly and Ron sighed. His ploy had worked. No one’s life was as sad as a baby who had lost both parents. That was why parents used the story of Harry Potter to guilt their kids. 

 

“Only…”

 

“Yes?” Ron asked.

 

“Can I just believe? Just for a while that she might come back?”

 

He took her hands in his. “Sure.”

 

For the next week, Ron came every morning and forced her out of the house and to the crest of the hill that overlooked the valley below to watch the sunrise and make a wish. Initially, he really had to _make_ her come out, but after that first week, she came willingly, meeting him right before the first ray peeked over the far away horizon.

 

One day when she joined him, he presented her with a bouquet of wild flowers. “Happy birthday,” he said, handing them to her, hiding a blush.

 

“Oh, wow,” Luna exclaimed. “Thanks. You remembered my birthday?”

 

“You forgot didn’t you?” Ron looked sad.

 

She shrugged. “This summer’s just gone by so fast. Birthdays don’t really seem important right now. You know?”

 

“But this is a very important birthday,” Ron argued. “It means one more year and you’ll be at Hogwarts…with me.”

 

She pulled the flowers to her face to hide the tears that were always at the ready for shedding. Turning ten was a reminder that at the end of this summer, he would be gone too. Everything she loved would be gone. Things would never be the same.

 

That morning when she walked into the house, her father was up waiting for her.

 

“Where were you?” he asked.

 

She stopped at the doorway, flowers in her hand and shock on her face. He hadn’t noticed her comings and goings since the day her mother had died. Even before then, if she really thought about it.

 

“I was watching the sunset with Ron,” she answered without thinking about it. She didn’t care about secrets anymore.

 

“Ron? Ron who?”

 

“Ron Weasley, my friend.”

 

“Your friend…” he sounded mystified, and kept mumbling unbelievingly as he puttered past her to the garden.

 

“Happy birthday to me,” she mumbled to herself as she went to the kitchen for a vase.

 

 

 

Luna tiptoed past her father’s room. It broke her heart that he didn’t believe her especially since he was a man who believed in all sorts of fantastical creatures. This made his refusal to accept that Luna had a friend that she spent time with everyday even more painful. 

 

She made her way to the meadow, _their_ meadow. The place where they had spent so much time watching clouds and sunrises, sharing childish hopes and dreams. 

 

The sun was still a sliver in the far off horizon, but he was already there waiting. Tomorrow was Ron’s first day at Hogwarts and Luna felt an inexplicable sadness that it was the end. Everything would be different after today. 

 

“You’re late.”

 

“You’re early.”

 

He shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. Can you feel it?”

 

She looked into the hazy distance and felt shivers as the wind changed direction. “Yeah.”

 

“Tomorrow my life begins.”

 

 _And_ _mine_ _ends_ , she thought.

 

He knocked gently into her, keeping his eyes on her face, as if to clear her melancholy. “You’ll be there soon.”

 

She shrugged. 

 

The fog was thinning and spreading and the sun was rising sweetly slow, as if it were giving them more of the moment.

 

Ron took her hand. “Made your wish?”

 

She looked at his vibrant blue eyes and tried to smile. But then, she remembered how sometimes eyes that were vibrant and full of life one moment can be stilled the next. She remembered, and the memory made her forget her belief in wishing on the days first rays of the sun.

 

And that is the story of how, in one summer Luna Lovegood lost everyone that she ever loved.

 

 

***

 

No words were shared by the two cellmates. The girl curled herself tightly against the old man’s frail body and together they rocked in sorrow. The only comfort the girl felt was that the pain they shared was not about their current condition, but about things that had happened years before. 

 

If she could continue to keep their minds off here and now’s mutual ache and the paralyzing uncertainty, then she was doing her job as a storyteller. 

 

So, the next night, when the old man laid his head in her lap and asked for a story, she once again dug to the depth of her life’s experiences for his distraction, for their survival.

 

“Tell me a story. Make it happy. We’ve had enough tragedy, enough suffering.”

 

Scratching another notch in the stone floor, she began again…

 

 

***

 

 

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Luna Lovegood. Her tenth year was by far her hardest year of her young life. Her mother was gone, her best friend was gone, and she was forlorn and miserable for a long time. The pain of her loss didn’t diminish, and her need for a mother didn’t go away. However, she did discover something she had not given thought to before, her father. It amazed her how little she knew of the man that was her father, until there was no one else in her life. 

 

She found him brilliant, wise and interesting, and he was beyond fascinated by her. Of course, it was greatly because they needed each other, and they saw so much of Pandora in the other.

 

As the school year started, she and her father tiptoed around each other.  Then, slowly, they and created a new life for each other. They only had one more year before she would be off to Hogwarts, and they tried every day to make new memories, to make a new life for themselves.

 

She missed Ron, of course, but not as much as she would have thought. It wasn’t like they saw each other that much during the school year anyway. A few times she would be down by the lane and she would see the children getting out of school. Poor Ginny walked home by herself for the first couple of months. And although she would wave to Luna, she never tried to speak to her. After a few months, though, Ginny had friends that walked home with her. Luna knew the youngest Weasley was the type of person who’d always have people around her. She figured it must be a talent you acquired coming from a large family.

 

Then there was the day that she was sitting by the stream and she tried to pretend that she wasn’t waiting, but even she didn’t believe herself. She heard the familiar whistling, only stronger and…different. 

 

“Hi ya,” he said, quietly coming up to her, almost nervous.

 

“Hi,” she answered, feeling awkward as well.

 

Luna felt a moment of dread, a foreshadowing that everything was different. And it was.

 

Ron spent the first half of the summer regaling her with his first year at Hogwarts—all that he had seen and all that he had done. He was giddy with heroism, new friends and adventure. It could be that Ron was trying to keep Luna’s mind off what she had lost, but she suspected toward the end of the summer that he had either forgotten that it hadn’t even been a year since her mother had died, or that he didn’t know just how important of a loss that was; he never talked about it.

 

The second half of the summer he spent preparing her for her time at Hogwarts, what she would see, what she would do, which classes she should take, and which House she would be sorted into. It was very overwhelming.

 

“You’ll probably be in Ravenclaw, as smart as you are.”

 

“But it’s not all about being smart right? From what you’ve told me, your friend Hermione is a genius, and she’s not in Ravenclaw.”

 

“True, you could be in Gryffindor too. You’re smart and brave.”

 

Luna beamed.

 

“Of course, if you’re in Slytherin, we won’t be friends anymore.”

 

“Well, then I won’t be in Slytherin,” Luna said. What she really wanted to say, but couldn’t voice the fear was, _We’ll still be friends at Hogwarts won’t we?_

 

“Nah, you’re not Slytherin material. You’d be Hufflepuff before you’d be Slytherin.”

 

At first the more he told her, the more she felt prepared and was ready. After a while though, it became overwhelming and doubts to how she would fit crept in. Ron seemed to notice—finally.

 

“Hey, meet me at the Hogwarts Express and I’ll introduce you to Hermione and Harry and you can sit with us.”

 

“Really?” Luna asked, incredulous, and all her fears evaporated.

 

Toward the end of the summer, Ron was the one to worried. “I haven’t gotten any letters back from Harry, neither has Hermione.”

 

“Maybe he doesn’t know how to send owl post.”

 

“What’s to know?” Ron asked, perplexed.

 

Luna shrugged.

 

“If we don’t hear from him by his birthday, Fred said we will go and demand to talk to him.”

 

“How will you get there?”

 

Now Ron shrugged. “I don’t know, they’ll figure it out.”

 

Before he left that day, he once again reminded her to meet him on the train and they would ride together.

 

That was the last time she saw him that summer. She reasoned they either went and got Harry, or they tried and had been caught. Either way, Ron didn’t come back to their meadow that summer.

 

The next day she snuck through the woods and to the other side of the valley where she knew the Burrow was. She didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, she was just curious about where Ron was and why she hadn’t seen him in so long. Before she had got to the yard of the odd-shaped house, she heard laughter. Following cautiously, she crept toward the noise. There they were, a group of rambunctious boys on broomsticks playing Quidditch. 

 

Luna watched mesmerized. She had never seen Ron so happy. The boy who could only be Harry Potter himself looked right at home on a broomstick surrounded with friends. Never in a million years could she imagine what that must be like. She didn’t dream of drawing attention to herself, and as she snuck back out of the field, she saw she wasn’t the only one watching the boys rapturously. Ron’s little sister Ginny was hidden in another set of bushes. She didn’t see Luna and Luna kept it that way as she escaped.

 

Two days later, Luna was tugging her father’s arm through the crowded train station on their way to the platform.

 

“Luna, honey, we’re a half an hour early. Relax.”

 

“I told Ron I would meet him.”

 

She stopped because her father had. Turning back at him, she saw that sad expression he wore when he felt sorry for her. She had forgotten that he didn’t believe her, didn’t believe she had a friend.  He hugged her to him and she made a mental note to never mention Ron’s name to him again.

 

She stood and waited, and waited and waited. Somewhere in the crowd, she heard a familiar voice frantically calling out Ron’s and Harry’s name, but there was no answer. Finally, Luna’s father pushed her on to the train, and as it pulled away and she felt stares all up and down the corridors as she made her way to an empty compartment. Though many people peeked in, no one joined her. She had hoped that Ginny Weasley and the frizzy haired girl she’d never seen before would join her after asking if she’d seen Ron. However, when she said no, the perturbed girls left.

 

Sighing, Luna got comfortable and dug out her new copy of The Quibbler, ignoring the scenery and the feeling of loneliness. Her father had finally published her scientific findings on the Whangdoodle, and she read and re-read the article describing her discovery with pride and a sensation that this was the beginning of something important for her. 

 

Standing in the Great Hall with a bunch of nervous first years, she didn’t worry. Ron had told her getting sorted was no big deal. He didn’t seem to have passed on this information to his sister, who looked terrified. She kept looking over to the Gryffindor table where her older twin brothers sat, still with no Ron. One of the twins gave her a thumbs-up sign, while the other imitated a dragon. Luna remembered that they had told Ron that to be sorted, you had to face a dragon; they must have told Ginny the same thing. Luna giggled to herself.

 

She was sorted into Ravenclaw like Ron had predicted, and she wished so much that she could have shared a knowing smile with him afterwards. However, he didn’t show up until much later and by the time she saw him, he was so elated by adventure and the attentions of the entire school, that she never even got a chance to talk to him, not that day, and not for a long time after. 

 

At first, she was sad about it, but after seeing how Hogwarts worked, and how little the Houses interacted, especially people from different years, she got used to it. Like the years before, from time to time, she would see Ron walking from class to class or leaving and entering the Great Hall, he would smile and wink, and she would wave slightly, and beam inwardly. 

 

Of course she wished they could be better friends, but she didn’t mind really. She understood that she would always be a little strange and probably wouldn’t fit in with the Gryffindors he hung out with anyway. Besides, the demands on her time were much more extreme then she would have expected anyway. She didn’t realize how much she didn’t know about anything until she got to her classes. She wasn’t the only one, and she reasoned there was a time and place for learning most of these things, and since magic was forbidden to the underage, there was only so much you could learn before coming to a proper school.  

 

Occasionally Ron would find her sitting by lake trying to figure out how to get the Giant Squid to surface or he would come across her when she was lost in the hallways and he would show her the way. She got used to finding him when she lest suspected but when she most needed him.

 

That summer when she sat by the stream, heard the familiar whistle, and smelt the familiar scent of grass and sweet sweat, she knew instantly that it would be different. They had both grown up, had their bits of adventure, had their slight run-ins with death and destruction. And while she didn’t have the front row seat to the ride that he did, she felt changed from the experience. The world had grown. 

*******

The old man whimpered, “So that’s it is it? A friendship forged in childhood and strengthened by years of experiences, both good and bad is to end when the outside world forces itself upon them?”

 

He sounded more invested than one usually got to a story told in the darkness of despair. He too was living vicariously through these memories.

 

“Shhh, I didn’t say it was over, just different. They were growing up. But you’re missing the point of this particular story.”

 

“And what is that?” he asked, sounding slightly irritated.

 

Luna looked up to the roof of their dungeon. Something was happening. The air had shifted in the house above. She could feel their time was almost up. She rushed on.

 

“For the moral of this story, you’ll have to wait for just a little bit longer.”

 

***

 

So, even though Luna Lovegood and Ron Weasley went to the same school and lived in the same castle now, they still remained only summer friends. But even the summers were different. Ron had other things preoccupying him and pulling him. Either Harry Potter stayed and all Ron’s time was devoted to him and playing Quidditch with the same brothers he used to run away from, or he was visiting other family members in exotic climes. Luna also began to travel with her father during the summers. 

 

There were some interaction in school, but it was usually odd moments when Luna was alone and Ron just happened upon her. There were times when she wished to talk to him, to see him and share a bit of information or gossip with him, but those were never the times she came upon him. 

 

Then there were periods when she just really needed someone—like when things that belonged to her went missing, or horrible things were written about her on the walls that she couldn’t get down. During those times, even though she didn’t see him, or get a chance to thank him, she knew it was he who got all her things returned to her and used a touch of magic to remove the hurtful claims littering the walls.

 

There was a month or so in Luna’s third year where she would seek out Ron, as she sensed that he needed her just as she needed him occasionally. Those were the times when Harry wasn’t talking to him for some reason. A spat had taken place that was being whispered throughout the halls that Luna refused to listen to. They would sit together in quiet, out-of-the-way places and he would rant about the suffering of being the _famous_ Harry Potter’s best friend.

 

Luna would see Harry and Hermione mope down the halls and a part of her, a deep, shameful part of her, would hope that this riff would remain and that Ron would need her more. But, that didn’t stop her from being happy for all of them when Harry defeated the dragon in the first task and Ron became once again inseparable with the other two.

 

Then the next year, on the Hogwarts Express, when she finally did meet them all; she was so nervous she spent most of the time hidden behind her latest copy of The Quibbler. She couldn’t believe how terrified she was of talking to Ron when he was with his friends. When she tried masking her irrational fear by laughing way too loud and jokes that weren’t that funny, he looked stunned and she could tell that he wished he didn’t even know her. It was awful!

 

But then Harry was very kind as they talked about Thestrals and she felt included as he put the responsibility of Ron’s owl Pidgewidgon’s care in her hands. 

 

Later that night Luna ran into Ron in the hallways rather close to curfew. They looked awkwardly at each other and both said at the same time:

 

“I’m sorry I embarrassed you in front of your friends.”

 

“I’m sorry I didn’t introduce you as my friend.”

 

The smiled at each other and some of the tension was released but it was still like they were meeting again all over again.

 

“I understand,” Luna said. “It’s got to be hard to gap me, a childhood friend with the ones you have now that you are becoming a man.”

 

Ron smiled. “I always forget just how smart you are. It’s no excuse I know, but still, it is a bit weird. It’s like the first time that Hermione came to the Burrow and my mum showed her all this wonky pictures of me as a baby. I mean there was one with my brothers and I running around in the rain starkers. You know what I mean?”

 

“Um, not really.”

 

Ron kicked a leg unconsciously against the wall as he looked like he was trying to find the right words. 

 

“Well, remember when we were seven and eight and we were playing by the river and I was pretending I was a hunting dog and you were a fox?”

 

Luna laughed. “Yeah I remember.”

 

“That was a great day. And is a memory I will keep with me for a long time. But it’s not something I want widely known, now do you see?”

 

“Yes. As I was your secret friend, and your summer friend now I must also add on your childhood friend.”

 

She said it calmly, as if it made perfect sense but they both looked at each other as if it were the end of something, and in a way, it was.

 

Then He Who Must Not Be Named came back and everything changed. Everyone grew up instantly and the things that seemed important no longer were and the secrets they kept no longer mattered.

 

Luna was invited to join the underground army forming by Ron and Harry and she was trained how to fight right alongside the rest of the soldiers. It was hard work and doom laid around every corner, but for Luna, she had never been happier. She had a purpose and she was included. 

*******

She heard scuffling coming from above them. There were curses flying and she heard a few Unforgivables and the voice of the woman who filled her heart with dread and turned her blood cold. But still, the girl down in the darkest of dungeons felt an inexplicable excitement and giddiness, and it wasn’t because she had gotten to one of the shining lights of her little story, or was feeling the happy ending she had promised. 

 

They heard a door creak open and something, or someone being chucked down the stairs. The girl propped up the old man, who was alert now, and made her way to the bottom of the stairs on her hands and knees. She stopped when she made contact with flesh. Two bodies had been thrown down the stairs and whether the fall had done it or they had been cursed that way, they were unconscious.

 

“Who are they, child?” the old man whispered anxiously.

 

“I don’t know,” the girl answered, feeling them to make sure they stilled breathed. “They’re alive and one is, one is a goblin I think. Yes, those are definitely goblin’s ears. She dragged them out of the way incase more bodies would be joining them and then she went back to the old man, who was shaking furiously. 

 

“This is the end, isn’t it?” he asked.

 

She shook her head but the old man didn’t see it.

 

“What was the moral of that story?” he asked, pulling the girl back to where they were moments before, even though it felt a lifetime ago. He sounded desperate and so she answered.

 

“That was the story of how Luna Lovegood’s very best friend, Ron Weasley was never there when she wanted him…”

 

The door opened again and more people were shoved in, but these two came in on their own two feet. The girl took one whiff of the new inhabitants, grass and sweet sweat, and her spirits soared. She almost heard in her mind the whistle of so many years ago.

 

“…but was always there when she _needed_ him.”

 

“Ron, Harry, is that you?”

 

“Luna?” they both asked together.

 

Luna was too overcome with emotion to answer. But they needed her and she barely remembered moving and barely remembered cutting them out, then she was holding on to Ron and he was there with her and promising her that everything would be okay.

 

“Is this a dream?” Luna asked, not allowing herself to hope. 

 

Somehow, there was light and she saw the goblin tied to Dean Thomas. Ron was there in front of her, looking into her eyes and wiping the hair off her forehead and the tears off her cheeks.

 

“It’s not a dream. It’s the end of the nightmare. Don’t you believe?”

 

 The next thing she knew, there was a house elf in the room and Harry was ordering them to leave. 

 

“Believe in you? Always.”

 

Ron took her hand and led her to the house elf.

 

“What about you?” Luna asked.

 

“Don’t worry about us; we’ll be right behind you.”

 

Luna didn’t want to leave without Ron and Harry, but there was a scream from above and Ron turned his attention frantically to the ceiling and wailed, “Hermione! Hermione!” 

 

Luna knew then that it would be better for Ron and Harry if they didn’t have to worry about everyone at the same time.

 

Taking a hold of the house elf with one hand and the shaking, frail hand of her dungeon companion with the other, she looked at him, beaming. 

 

“You see Mr. Ollivander? I told you this story had a happy ending.”


End file.
